Inxton is an umbrella organization for open-source and internal projects developed at MTS.
Our projects primarily focus on industrial automation, including application frameworks, components, production data management, and related domains.
AX# and AXOpen are under development and they they are build on top of SIMATIC-AX platform.
As SIMATIC AX is currently in a limited release phase, kindly take note of the following:
It is necessary to have a valid license for SIMATIC AX in order to use AX# and AXOpen!
SIMATIC AX is currently in a limited sales release in selected European countries only. You will need to request access from the AX team which will check if your use case is suitable for the current state of the product. The first step to getting the approval is contacting your local SIEMENS sales representative or writing an email to [email protected].
TcOpen is an application framework based on the Beckhoff TwinCAT3 platform and Inxton.Vortex.Framework. It offers a wide variety of libraries and tools for developing automation projects.
Originally, TcOpen was developed under the TcOpenGroup organization on GitHub, with the majority of the work done by developers at MTS. Later, to unify and streamline our workflows, we forked the repository into the Inxton organization. Further development by MTS developers will continue here.
The goal of the TcOpen project has been to provide the community with an advanced ecosystem enabling rapid development of industrial applications. Recently, Beckhoff announced a new system called PLC++ that could potentially address many of the challenges we encountered while building TcOpen on TwinCAT3. Some of these challenges were outlined by Jakob Sagatowski in this YouTube video.
Currently, we are at a crossroads, and our path forward is uncertain. TcOpen is widely used at MTS, and we will continue to maintain it to meet our internal needs. However, due to limited resources, we will not be able to provide support to external entities, and there are no specific plans to port TcOpen to the latest .NET frameworks.
We have also encountered considerable difficulties in updating TcOpen to build 4026 of TwinCAT3, and at this point, attempts to do so have been suspended.
